The first female to win the Hugo and Nebula awards, along with the first author to reach the New York Times best seller list with a sci-fi novel, Anne McCaffrey died of a stroke at her home in Ireland on the 21st.

Best known for her Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series, she also wrote both hard and soft SF.

I only read one or two in the Dragonriders series I had intentions on reading more but never seemed to get around to it. I thought they were pretty clever and had an interesting concept with the 'threads' or whatever they were called.